Web switches provide traffic management to computer networks. The traffic management extends to packets received both from an outside network, such as the Internet, and from an internal network. Web switches, however, are susceptible to denial of service attacks. In a denial of service attack, a network is assaulted with a flood of requests such that regular traffic is either slowed or completely interrupted. One common type of denial of service attack is SYN flooding. In a SYN flood attack, the final acknowledgement in the server's SYN-ACK response in the handshaking process is withheld. This causes the server to keep signaling until it eventually times out. What is needed is a solution which protects a web server from SYN flood attacks.
Additionally, even if a web switch isn't under attack, there may be situations where an individual source IP address is taking more than an appropriate share of the network resources. Even though the client may not have malicious intent, it can still result in a disruption in service. Therefore, what is also needed is a solution which prevents a source IP address from taking more than an appropriate share of system resources.